Zscaler Acquires Microsegmentation Firm Edgewise Networks

Cloud security firm Zscaler has acquired Edgewise Networks, a company that helps customers secure application-to-application communications using a zero-trust approach through microsegmentation.

The acquisition was announced on Thursday and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded by Peter Smith and Harry Sverdlove in the Spring of 2016 with the belief that there is a fundamental flaw in defense-by-firewall, Edgewise emerged from stealth mode in July 2019 

As SecurityWeek’s Kevin Townsend explained when covering Edgewise’s launch in 2017, “while firewalls can detect and block known bad addresses, they cannot detect bad use of good addresses. This means that any compromise of a ‘good’ address can allow an attacker straight through the firewall, by policy, and into an attack position.”

The company explains that it “improves the security of east-west communication by verifying the identity of application software, services and processes to achieve a zero trust environment which measurably reduces the attack surface and lowers the risk of application compromise and data breaches.”

Zscaler says the acquisition will broaden its cloud-native platform and secure application-to-application communication to deliver stronger security in public clouds and data centers. 

“We are proud to have made zero trust security achievable in complex, multi-cloud environments. Our core innovation is the use of software identity verification to simultaneously strengthen security and simplify operations,” said Peter Smith, CEO of Edgewise. “Edgewise automates the identity-based policies making it easy to reduce the attack surface across public cloud, multi-cloud, data center and even container environments. We are thrilled to join the Zscaler family and share our innovation with the global Zscaler customer base.”